PUBLIC MARKS with tags performance & server

The first things to do when auditing an unknown server

In this talk, Khalid of 2bits.com, Inc., Inc will talk about a how to scale a Drupal web site with the following statistics. 3.4 million pages per day peak 92 million page views per month 189,650 page views per hour peak 840,000 visits on peak day 22.96 million visits per month 52,747 visits per hour peak So far, this is the highest traffic a Drupal site gets that we heard of. What is amazing is that this web site runs on a single mid range server ...

Graphic stand-alone administration for memcached to monitor and debug purpose

Using a MySQL "HandlerSocket" plugin, Yoshinori Matsunobu achieved a 750K requests per second on a normal box, which was slightly more performant than with a memcached server

Performance counters for diagnosing SQL Server

Actually usually any web server can handle a normal day of work, but what happens when the server under your administration gets, stumbled, or appears in Slashdot, or digg front pages, now a days even twitter may drive a lot of traffic to a webpage.

MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that will assist you with your MySQL configuration and make recommendations for increased performance and stability. Within seconds, it will display statistics about your MySQL installation and the areas where it can be improved. It’s key to remember that MySQLTuner is a script which can assist you with your server, but it is not the solution to a badly performing MySQL server. The best performance gains come from a thorough review of the queries sent to the server, and an evaluation of the MySQL server itself. A qualified developer in your application’s programming or scripting language should be able to work with a MySQL database administrator to find improvements for your server. Once the server and application are optimized well, you may need to consider hardware upgrades to the physical server itself. This is a really useful tool for helping to optimize MySQL performance.Understanding the various my.cnf variables and how they affect performance can seem really complicated but this tool takes some of the pain away and makes it easier to understand the effects of each variable.It is especially useful to be able to see the global memory usage, memory usage per thread and the maximum possible memory usage - that is really valuable information that is otherwise complex to calculate.

Out of the box, Zimbra is tuned for a fairly beefy machine. Zimbra will easily consume 1.5GB of ram with default settings. Some of these changes mean turning off a few Zimbra features and there are quite a few ways to do this, so you will need to evaluate memory usage given your own situation. If you simply can't live without *all* the Zimbra features or intend to support a larger (> 15) number of users, my only suggestion is to get more ram ;). But if you are willing to make some compromises, please read on. The changes below are ones that I found to be a reasonable compromise. With a few easy changes, you can bring the memory consumption way down, so that it will hum along just fine on a server with ~512MB of ram. Of course this reduces the amount of users that your server can support, but I've found that for a small installation of around 15 users, these settings will work just fine and give you the same performance as the out-of-the-box config with gobs of RAM. The server I have been testing with has 560MB of ram, and after tuning consumes all the ram and only about 80MB of swap on average. You will find that if you don't make changes similar to the ones suggested below with ~512MB of ram, your Zimbra install will slowly creep up its consumption of swap and your Zimbra install will start to crawl. Also, > 512MB seems to be about the minimum amount of ram to get a useful/zippy server

I have tried to run both Debian Etch and Ubuntu 8.04 Server on the cluster nodes, in Dom0. I started my tests with Debian, but I had some issues with slow samba performance in one VM that I couldn't fix so I decided to try Ubuntu Server, for the first time. Both installation went OK, the main difference was that I used mainly source code in Debian, but only packages in Ubuntu. I actually ran into more problems with Ubuntu due to some early bugs in the 8.04 release, will describe them below as I go along. And I have still to prove that running this setup in Ubuntu is stable.

1.4.11 got a new module for streaming Flash movie files called mod_flv_streaming. This module allows you to seek in FLV files using the high performance infrastructure of lighttpd. The idea is simple and explained and implemented on ‘Streaming’ flv video via PHP, take two at http://www.flashcomguru.com/ But instead of streaming the file through PHP we do it in the webserver. The module expects a request for the URL which matches flv-streaming.extensions and can handle a ’?start=’ as part of the request. The information to pass into the ‘start’ parameter is extractly by the flash-player from the meta-data of the flv-files. The meta-data can be setup with flvtool2 Now I leave it to you to combine this with mod_secdownload to create a flv-streaming server for free with deep/hot linking protected movies. server.modules = ( ..., "mod_secdownload", ## optional "mod_flv_streaming", ... ) flv-streaming.extensions = ( ".flv" ) Take the flash-player from flashcomguru and adjust the URL in the player and try yourself.

Caching is the temporary storage of frequently accessed data in higher speed media (typically SRAM or RAM) for more efficient retrieval. Web caching stores frequently used objects closer to the client through browser, proxy, or server caches. By storing "fresh" objects closer to your users, you avoid round trips to the origin server, reducing bandwidth consumption, server load, and most importantly, latency. This article shows how to configure your Apache server for more efficient caching to save bandwidth and improve performance. Caching is not just for static sites, even dynamic sites can benefit from caching. Graphics and multimedia typically don't change as frequently as (X)HTML files. Graphics that seldom change like logos, headers, and navigation can be given longer expiration times while resources that change more frequently like XHTML and XML files can be given shorter expiration times. By designing your site with caching in mind, you can target different classes of resources to give them different expiration times with only a few lines of code.

Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility — all of these describe lighttpd (pron. lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it’s Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.

You can benchmark Apache, IIS and other web server with apache benchmarking tool called ab. Recently I was asked to performance benchmarks for different web servers. It is true that benchmarking a web server is not an easy task. From how to benchmark a web server, “First, benchmarking a web server is not an easy thing. To benchmark a web server the time it will take to give a page is not important: you don’t care if a user can have his page in 0.1 ms or in 0.05 ms as nobody can have such delays on the Internet.

Usefull, free tools for server load testing.

Apache server performance can be improved by adding additional hardware resources such as RAM, faster CPU, etc. But most of the time, the same result can be achieved by custom configuration of the server. This article looks into getting maximum performance out of Apache with the existing hardware resources, specifically on Linux systems. Of course, it is assumed that there is enough hardware resources - especially enough RAM that the server isn’t swapping frequently. First two sections look into various Compile-Time and Run-Time configuration options. The Run-Time section assumes that Apache is compiled with prefork MPM. HTTP compression and caching is discussed next. Finally, using separate servers for serving static and dynamic contents is covered. Basic knowledge of compiling and configuring Apache and Linux are assumed.

Applications using the LAMP (Linux®, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) architecture are constantly being developed and deployed. But often the server administrator has little control over the application itself because it's written by someone else. This series of three articles discusses many of the server configuration items that can make or break an application's performance. This second article focuses on steps you can take to optimize Apache and PHP. Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl) form the basis of the LAMP architecture for Web applications. Many open source packages based on LAMP components are available to solve a variety of problems. As the load on an application increases, the bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure become more apparent in the form of slow response to user requests. The previous article showed you how to tune the Linux system and covered the basics of LAMP and performance measurement. This article focuses on the Web server components, Apache and PHP.